Now we come to what is perhaps the oddest twist of all. The law is real; The law is indispensable; but the law is not the point; Not really.
"And the law is given unto men. And by the law no flesh is justified; or by the law men are cut off. Yea, by the temporal law they were cut off; and also, by the spiritual law they perish from that which is good, and become miserable forever" (v. 5).
For all the trouble we have taken to set up the law with its rewards and consequences, the choice placed before us is not really whether or not we will keep the law. We can't. Nobody (except for a God) could. We can try, but we will fall short. We are "flesh" (v. 5). We have a fallen nature, a "will of the flesh" (v. 29) in which there are evil tendencies that "giveth the devil power to captivate." Despite the best efforts of the best of us, we are, all of us, "lost" (v. 21), "cut off" (v. 5) or separated from God. Left to the law alone, we would "perish from that which is good, and become miserable for ever" (v. 5). Even being given the elements of will (the ability to act), the law, and opposition is not sufficient to give us true freedom. One more thing was necessary if God was going to create not just a temporary arena for choice, but a freedom with the potential to END with us having joy and doing good.
"And the Messiah cometh in the fulness of time, that he may redeem the children of men from the fall. And because they are redeemed from the fall, they have become free forever...." (v. 26).
Our choice is not so much whether we will live the law, but how we will handle our failure. The law can't save, whether it be the Law of Moses (a "temporal" law of outward observances) or even a higher "spiritual" law (v. 5). If keeping the temporal law was impossible, the spiritual law is even further out of reach of our unaided choice.
"Wherefore, redemption cometh in and through the Holy Messiah; for he is full of grace and truth. Behold, he offereth himself a sacrifice for sin, to answer the ends of the law, unto all those who have a broken heart and a contrite spirit; and unto none else can the ends of the law be answered" (v. 6-7).
It bears repeating. Our choice is not so much whether we will live the law, but how we will handle our failure. The tension of our freedom becomes not JUST between good and evil, but ALSO between self and God, between stubborn independence and willful submission. The only way we can lay hold of the good we can see and desire is by means of a Mediator, whose "merits, mercy and grace" (v. 8) enable him to "make intercession" (v. 9) and bring about our redemption (v. 6, 26).
And that redemption is NOT laid hold upon by trying to be as good as we can. The laws that govern it are a little different. We access it when we "believe" (v. 9) in the Messiah, by "looking" (v. 28) to him (keep in mind the book of Mormon uses the terms "rely upon" and "trust in" interchangeably with "believing in" Christ). We access it when we repent (v. 21), coming before God with a "broken heart and a contrite spirit" (v. 7). All of a sudden it isn't about our relationship to an inanimate, unresponsive standard of right and wrong. Instead it is about our relationship to a person--a perfect person who embodies the law ("holiness and truth" v. 10), but because he is alive and loving, i.e. a person, also embodies the possibility of mercy and grace. We don't choose liberty and eternal life by choosing to obey the law. Instead we have to choose a very specific kind of relationship with the "great Mediator of all men."
The difference is shown in the pronouns. It's not just THE law we striving to obey any more, but HIS commandments we are hearkening too, HIS words we are faithful to. It's Him we look to, Him we believe in, Him to whom we offer a broken heart and a contrite spirit. The effort isn't any less, perhaps, but it's in the context of a relationship now, a relationship with someone who is full of mercy and grace and that makes all the difference. Lehi isn't just encouraging his sons to be good. He is encouraging them to come unto Christ.
Again, I want to avoid theorizing overly much about HOW all of this works. I'm much more interested in this particular series of meditations with the experiential than the theoretical. So I'm going to close this letter with an experience I've always found suggestive. It's from an article by Mormon Poet Colin B. Douglas in an article of his from the April 1989 Ensign with the marvelous title of "What I’ve Learned About Grace Since Coming Down from the Sycamore Tree."
"About ten years ago, I realized that I needed to learn something. My spiritual life wasn’t very satisfying; I wasn’t very happy; and I didn’t know why."
"I knew a great deal about the “laws of happiness,” and I was trying - earnestly -to apply them. After all, wasn’t that the way to happiness and, ultimately, exaltation? Obey the law, get the blessing. Simple, straightforward justice."
"Of course, I knew that I hadn’t obeyed the law perfectly. But I had somehow got the understanding that if I set goals for myself, continually strove for perfection, and maintained a positive attitude, I could finally purify myself. I had mistakenly believed what I had heard somewhere - that what the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. After I had achieved this self-perfection, the atonement of Christ would then compensate for all my past shortcomings - or so I thought."
"But I began to feel that this “obey the law, get the blessing” approach was rather crass; that it was almost on the level of “put in the coin, get the purchase”; that there must be more to a spiritual life than that. Furthermore, I began to realize that this method was demanding more coins than I had in my spiritual pockets. I could usually (though not always) find the attend-your-meetings coin and the Word of Wisdom and tithing coins. But I was frequently unable to find all the denominations of love-thy-neighbor-as-thyself coins. I became anxious and discouraged about never having enough coins."
"I also realized there was something cold about my spiritual life. I knew Latter-day Saints, some of them fellow ward members, in whom love and peace seemed to flow like a spring of water. I heard others speak of the Lord as if he were an intimate, cherished friend. But I was not one of them. What was I missing?"
"I came to find out. I am sorry to say that I did not at first find it in the scriptures, because, as I came to understand, I was not reading the scriptures - particularly the Book of Mormon - as they had been written, but was imposing on them certain incorrect preconceptions. (Of course, after I had learned what to look for, I found it there in abundance.)"
"One of my first and most important clues came from a non-Latter-day Saint, C. S. Lewis: “If I am a field that contains nothing but grass seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and resown.” (Mere Christianity, New York: Macmillan, 1971, p. 168.) I saw that I needed plowing and re-sowing, and it was quite clear to me who was the Ploughman and the Sower."
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